December | 2012 | Intimate Excellent

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Timo Nunez

Artistic director/guitarist Gabriel Osuna brings dancers Timo Nuňez, Elena Osuna and Mizuho Sato; singer Vicente Griego “El Cartucho”; and percussionist Gerardo Morales together for a sizzling hot night of passionate flamenco music and dance at the Fountain Theatre on Sunday, January 13th at 8pm. With only 78 seats in four rows, the Fountain is the perfect place to view world-class flamenco in an intimate setting. Ole!

Elena Osuna

Forever Flamenco  Sunday Jan 13 8pm  (323) 663-1525   More Info

Posted in Arts, Dance, dancer, flamenco, singer, Theater, theatre

Tagged Elena Osuna, Flamenco, flamenco dancing, flamenco guitar, flamenco music, Forever Flamenco, Gabriel Osuna, gerardo morales, Mizuho Sato, Timo Nunez, Vicente Griego

Enjoy this new video created from our critically acclaimed sold-out 2012 production of Cyrano.  This world premiere of a new play, a re-imagined sign language spin on the romantic classic Cyrano de Bergerac reset in a modern city, has been named a Theater Highlight of 2012 by LA Stage Times.

In this funny, poetic and powerful co-production between Fountain Theatre and Deaf West Theatre, Cyrano is a brilliant deaf poet in love with a hearing woman.

Posted in actors, Arts, Deaf, director, Fountain Theatre, new plays, performing arts, plays, playwright, poetry, Theater, theatre

Tagged American Sign Language, ASL Poetry, Best of 2012, Cyrano, Cyrano de Bergerac, deaf, deaf poet, deaf theatre, Deaf West Theatre, deafness, Erinn Anova, Fountain Theatre, LA Stage Times, Los Angeles, new plays, Paul Raci, plays, playwriting, sign language, Stephen Sachs, theater, Troy Kotsur, world premiere

“In the Red and Brown Water” (Fountain Theatre, 2012)

The Los Angeles Times has honored the The Fountain Theatre’s critically acclaimed Los Angeles premiere of In the Red and Brown Water by selecting it to its year-end list of Best Theatre in 2012. LA Times Theater Critic Charles McNulty, who hailed the production as “sensational” in his October review, highlighted the smash hit production in his Best Theatre of 2012 feature this Sunday as “a marvel of ensemble acting”, declaring “In the Red and Brown Water at the Fountain Theatre gets my vote for production of the year.”

“All of us at the Fountain Theatre are extremely proud of this production, ” says Fountain Co-Artistic Director Stephen Sachs. “The acknowledgement from the LA Times is particularly rewarding because Charles McNulty compiled his Best of 2012 list from all of the productions of plays he saw this year, across the country, on both coasts. It demonstrates that the Fountain Theatre — and theater in Los Angeles — can excel at a level as high as anywhere in the country.”

In the Red and Brown Water also topped the 2012 Best of Los Angeles Theater list on the LA Theater website Bitter Lemons. Editor Colin Mitchell hails the Fountain production as “Just pure theatrical heaven from top to bottom, my pick to win every award that it can possibly be nominated for; lead Diarra Kilpatrick is otherworldly. Still playing. Go see it. Now.”

Directed by Shirley Jo Finney, In the Red and Brown Water by Tarell Alvin McCraney stars Dorian Baucum, Peggy Blow, Gilbert Glenn Brown, Justin Chu Cary, Diarra Kilpatrick, Stephen Marshall, Simone Missick, Iona Morris, Theodore Perkins, and Maya Lynne Robinson.

The acclaimed smash-hit production has been extended to February 24th, 2013. (323) 663-1525  More Info

Posted in actors, Arts, director, Drama, Fountain Theatre, new plays, performing arts, plays, playwright, Theater, theatre

Tagged Best of 2012, Bitter Lemons, Charles McNulty, Colin Mitchell, Diarra Kilpatrick, Dorian Baucum, Fountain Theatre, Gilbert Glenn Brown, In The Red and Brown Water, Iona Morris, Justin Chu Cary, Los Angeles, Los Angeles Premiere, Los Angeles Times, Maya Lynne Robinson, new plays, Peggy Blow, plays, playwriting, Shirley Jo Finney, Simone Missick, Stephen Marshall, Stephen Sachs, Tarell Alvin McCraney, theater, Theodore Perkins

Polly Carl

by Polly Carl

When asked a few years ago if someone with talent and desire to write plays should get an advanced degree in playwriting, I said unequivocally yes for two reasons:

  1. I’m a huge advocate of graduate school of any sort. Graduate school is an indulgence that every one who can access, should. I don’t have a timeline for when, but I truly believe taking three or more years to think about things that interest you and make you passionate and advance your understanding of the world is absolutely essential—especially if you want to tell stories that you hope will mean something to an audience greater than your best buds and your mom.
  2. As far as making theater goes, the significant career opportunities in our business are so few and far between that I would tell prospective students any leg up was worth considering seriously. For example, if your script was on a pile, or if you were applying for a directing fellowship, those letters M-F-A might advance your script/application up the stacks.

My advice to graduating MFAs used to be different too and extremely practical! As you’re thinking about that final year in the program focus on:

  1. Having one fully realized “straight” play with no more than four characters is essential. The MFA is a launching moment and to launch in any significant way into the regional theater movement, your most realistic shot is to have one solid producible play in the most conventional sense.
  2. Make connections with all of the play development centers (Playwrights’ Center, New Dramatists, the Lark, Sundance, Playwrights Foundation, etc.) and apply to every opportunity they offer. In other words, find an artistic home to develop as an artist. This advice hasn’t changed.

But as I experience the work the next generation of theater makers is creating and in what context, I’m beginning to shift my advice. More importantly, I’m convinced now that I’m not the right person to give advice. I’m not being humble here, but rather acknowledging that I’m giving advice from the vantage point of having a salary and health insurance and that my advice is becoming less and less practical and perhaps makes assumptions about what people want out of a career that are more about what I think they should want.

But here goes some advice anyway.

  1. Don’t apply for an MFA in anything right out of undergrad.  If you desire to be a storyteller from any vantage point (playwright, director, dramaturg, actor, designer, stage manager, etc.) spend some time living in the world and figuring out what stories you want to tell. Travel, work strange jobs, taste exotic foods, become a marathon runner, join the Peace Corps, and engage everything that feels unfamiliar.
  2. Don’t take a menial job in a large theater just to be near established theater artists. I think the worst thing an aspiring young theater artist can do is to learn too soon the business-as-usual way of making theater.
  3. See as much of every kind of art that you can take in. Close down your Facebook and Twitter accounts for days at a time and read novels, listen to authors read their works on podcasts, go to museums, operas, symphonies, rock concerts, and ballets.
  4. Volunteer at places unrelated to theater. Understand that theater is a part of a whole, but not the whole.
  5. Fall in love. Break up. Fall in love again. This can be love with people, other artists, art objects, remote camping sites, whatever.
  6. Then after all of that, if you still find that you must tell stories, and that you must live in proximity to a stage, by all means apply to an MFA program. It will be the greatest gift you can give yourself.

For those of you graduating in the spring with your MFA:

  1. Maybe go to New York, but maybe not.
  2. Don’t worry about getting an agent.
  3. Find one or two or three other people you want to make theater with and live in the same city, or rural town, or on a tropical island together, and make theater according to your mutually agreed upon definition.
  4. Tell the stories you want to tell and only the stories the want to tell. You will get many opportunities to tell stories other people want to tell; minimize these gigs.
  5. Introduce yourself to every theater maker who inspires you, but don’t bother to try and ingratiate yourself into institutions or try to get next to artistic directors whose work you don’t admire just on the off chance they might throw an opportunity your way. There will be plenty of time in your career for compromising and groveling. Save your knees as long as possible.
  6. Think big. Big plays, big performances, big social change, big bold theater that will burn the house down.

For anyone trying to sort out how to make it in this business: there is no formula. As artists, I personally think rules and boundaries and formulas and systems and even institutions can dampen the possibilities for our artistic expression. And nothing can be more harmful to creativity than believing there is one path toward it.

So get an MFA, maybe. Move to New York, maybe. Write only two-handers, maybe. Buy bottles of expensive wines for Artistic Directors, maybe. But for sure, find a way to tell the stories that will choke you to your very death if they aren’t let out, and don’t make any assumptions that there’s a singular career trajectory for the theater artist.

Polly Carl is the director of the Center for the Theater Commons at Emerson College, and the editor of the online journal HowlRound. 

Posted in actors, Arts, Drama, new plays, performing arts, plays, playwright, Theater, theatre

Tagged artists, Deaf West Theatre, drama class, dramaturg, Fountain Theatre, graduate school, Los Angeles, MFA, New Dramatists, new play, new plays, New York, plays, playwright, Playwrights Foundation, Playwrights’ Center, playwriting, Polly Carl, storytelling, students, Sundance, the Lark, theater

The actress has been called ‘superb’ in her role in Tarell Alvin McCraney’s ‘In the Red and Brown Water,’ a play that exists in two conceptual dimensions.

by Reed Johnson

Before Diarra Kilpatrick was cast in August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson,” at age 12, she already knew what she wanted to do with her life: anything but acting.

So when her hometown Detroit newspaper interviewed her about the production at a suburban theater, Kilpatrick told the reporter she wanted to be a lawyer or maybe the president of a public relations firm. But definitely not “a struggling actor,” she said.

Recounting that anecdote recently at the Fountain Theatre in Hollywood, where she’s playing the lead role in Tarell Alvin McCraney’s mytho-poetic drama “In the Red and Brown Water,” Kilpatrick laughed at the memory of her precocious pre-adolescent self.

Because by the time the article went to press, Kilpatrick knew what she absolutely had to do with her life: Be an actor.

“It was the quality of the actors that I got a chance to work with and see them up close,” she said, explaining her overnight career conversion during “The Piano Lesson.” “And the production, the material — it was August Wilson.”

Startling transformations are the stuff of theatrical magic, and they’re central to McCraney’s play, which opened at the Fountain in October and has been extended through Feb. 24. “In the Red and Brown Water” is the first of McCraney’s trilogy “The Brother/Sister Plays,” produced off-Broadway at the Public Theater in 2009.

Set during the “distant present” at a mythical housing project in a make-believe Louisiana bayou town, “In the Red and Brown Water” exists simultaneously in two conceptual dimensions.

There’s the 21st century world of Oya (Kilpatrick), a high school track star torn between her college ambitions and the need to care for her ailing Mama Mojo (Peggy A. Blow) and between her affection for the stammering, sweetly devoted Ogun (Dorian Christian Baucum) and the dangerous erotic heat she feels whenever Shango (Gilbert Glenn Brown) comes around her door.

Diarra Kilpatrick and Gilbert Glenn Brown in “In the Red and Brown Water”

But in another dimension — parallel, yet inseparable — the play is a spiritual struggle that draws on the stories, cosmologies and archetypal gods of the Yoruba people of West Africa, whose legends were transported by slaves to the New World. Virtually all of the play’s 10 characters are named for traditional Yoruba orishas, or spirits: Elegba, the shape-shifting trickster; Shango, god of fire and lightning; Ogun, the deity of iron-working and war.

And Oya, goddess of the Niger River, wind, storms and, as Kilpatrick puts it, “revolutionary transformation.”

“It’s not like ‘Let’s redecorate the house,’ it’s like ‘Let’s tear this [stuff] down! Let’s knock the walls out!’” Kilpatrick explained. “So when Oya comes into your life, people fear her because it means your life is about to change.”

For Kilpatrick, the task was to simultaneously, plausibly portray Oya as a contemporary young woman as well as a force of nature. “This is a girl who listens to Nicki Minaj and Rihanna,” Kilpatrick said. “This is the texture of right now. But yeah, we also carry in our DNA these stories from hundreds and hundreds of years ago.”

In his review, Times theater critic Charles McNulty praised the Fountain’s production, directed by Shirley Jo Finney, as “sensational” and Kilpatrick as “superb.”

Growing up in Detroit, Kilpatrick was taken regularly by her mother to plays, art exhibitions and other cultural events. “Let me just say, if there was a play that was done in Detroit I probably saw it, particularly if it was a black play, and let’s say 95% of them are black plays in Detroit.”

Between ages 12 and 16, Kilpatrick took part in Detroit’s Mosaic Youth Theatre, one of the country’s most accomplished youth theater programs. She also acted at her private college prep school, Detroit Country Day, before moving to the theater program at New York University, where she performed in plays like Suzan-Lori Parks’ “In the Blood” and Stephen Adly Guirgis,’ “Our Lady of 121st Street.”

“I was one of the only black girls who had made it that far who could cuss and make it sound real,” Kilpatrick said, laughing. NYU instructors strongly encouraged her to lose the vestigial Southern accent she’d picked up from her South Carolina-migrant forebears.

Given the realities of casting for African American actors, Kilpatrick said, it’s important to be able to switch accents and speech styles depending on the role. “You don’t want the private school to eat up all the richness of … your flavor. Because no matter what that flavor is, that’s going to be your calling card at the end of the day.”

Kilpatrick came to Los Angeles in 2007. She has appeared in the Lower Depth Theatre Ensemble’s version of “Three Sisters,” set in Trinidad, and a half-black, half-Mexican transgender male in the Bootleg Theater’s production of Gary Lennon’s “The Interlopers” last year, among other roles.

But getting to play a role like Oya “is a blessing,” especially with this cast and “Shirley Jo at the helm,” she said.

“There aren’t parts like this for black women very often. It’s like Hamlet, it’s like King Lear, it’s Medea. It’s an opportunity to really go in there.”

In the Red and Brown Water  Extended to Feb 24  (323) 663-1525 More

Posted in actors, Arts, Drama, performing arts, plays, playwright, Theater, theatre

Tagged actor, actress, African American, August Wilson, Bootleg Theater, Charles McNulty, Detroit, Diarra Kilpatrick, Dorian Christian Baucum, Fountain Theatre, Gilbert Glenn Brown, Hamlet, In the Blood, In The Red and Brown Water, King Lear, Los Angeles, Los Angeles Premiere, Los Angeles Times, Medea, new plays, Nicki Minaj, orishas, Our Lady of 121st Street, Oya, Peggy A. Blow, plays, Public Theater, Rihanna, Shirley Jo Finney, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Suzan Lori Parks, Tarell Alvin McCraney, The Interlopers, The Piano Lesson, West Africa, Yoruba

Polly Carl

by Polly Carl

Something profound happened on the first Tuesday in November, something I’m still trying to digest fully. To my mind the election results represent a victory of love over hate, of human dignity over market forces, of public service over private gain. Those who spewed hate toward women weren’t reelected. Those who insisted on heteronormativity as the only way were defeated handily, and those who spouted the rights of the wealthy to buy elections for the sake of perpetuating the private markets of their personal fortunes were sent packing. On that Tuesday, at least for a moment, we redefined public service as something meant to benefit everyone, not just the few.

John Adams

John Adams wrote in a letter to his son, “Public business, my son, must always be done by somebody. It will be done by somebody or another. If wise men decline it, others will not; if honest men refuse it, others will not.” Most of us would agree, though deeply flawed, our Founding Fathers were wise men who created a frame for a political system that in many ways has served us well.

I feel and see more deeply the cost of a commitment to public service. The long view of history reminds me that the $4.2 billion we spent on this last election is recent history. And it also makes me ask: Are too many honest men and women refusing public service, making room for too many politicians driven by ego and the desire for personal gain? And because this is what I do for a living, it makes me think about the history of the regional theater movement—about our leaders, past and present. And I ask: How do we currently as a field define our relationship to public service? We take a tax break, and like churches and libraries, we offer something of value to the public. When we say we choose to make our art in the context of nonprofit theater, we embrace a form of public service—not for the sake of glamorous careers that include arriving in limos to the Tony awards and sipping champagne with the stars. I intentionally chose to work inside nonprofit theater because I had a deep desire to effect change in the world. But somewhere along the historical path of the nonprofit theater movement, public service to artists and a community ran head long into private desires for personal success. Like our political milieu the public good has gotten confused with private desires.

In both editing the report, In the Intersection: Partnerships in the New Play Sector by Diane Ragsdale, just released by The Center for the Theater Commons, and attending the convening that the report covers, I have a deeper understanding of the movement of history in our field from a purer sense of public service to a market-driven desire to both serve and survive. These historical shifts in mission and purpose aren’t simple, and they don’t happen over night. We didn’t go from John Adams to Mitt Romney without struggles of every kind. But if you are invested in the future of the nonprofit theater movement, I suggest you read this report closely (you can download it for free), because it will place you in the thick of history whose next chapter will be written by the readers of HowlRound, among others.

Oskar Eustis

The meeting this report covers was, from my vantage point, remarkable. The participants are public servants struggling with increased market pressures—how to make a public good in the face of enormous obstacles. The report covers a historical shift from the very opening conversation between Rocco Landesman and Gregory Mosher, and that shift is more deeply explored in the second chapter in the conversation between Oskar Eustis and Robert Brustein. Eustis frames the very question that the report explores:

What strikes me as you talk Bob is that . . . everything you’re talking about is about being part of a larger history that stems back really to that beach in Provincetown in 1920 through to the present. And you talk about being engaged in the training and the discussion and the creation at all at once so that, in a way, you are creating a world of values that is separate. And that world of values is part of a larger history; but we haven’t talked about profit or commerce in any of this really. And I think that one of the difficult things is: Where do you find an alternative set of values in the world—where you can live inside an alternative set of conversations about “profit and loss”?

Tony Taccone

In pondering this question we must consider the history of our own movement. We must consider the values and the words of the founders of this movement like Robert Brustein and Zelda Fichandler who are still around and able to guide us—and not just when it’s to our advantage to do so, but even when that looking back questions our practices in the moment. The group of twenty-six nonprofit theater representatives, commercial producers, and artists that gathered for this conversation did exactly that. And in the looking backwards and forwards, all of us in that room felt perplexed about where the nonprofit theater movement stands now. We asked ourselves how we had gotten from there to here and most of the nonprofit participants, as you will read, were not convinced that here was what our founders meant when they argued that nonprofit status made sense for the theater. In one of the many honest and soul-searching moments in the report, Tony Taccone, artistic director of Berkeley Rep, tries to make sense of how we came to this moment in our history:

And so we’re trying to describe what happened to us. And trying to exercise a little bit of consciousness about where we want to go. Is there a creative progressive place we can go together as a community, as a culture? Because individualism, fame, money, materialism lead one another to an iceberg. But we all kind of need and want those things too; so it’s a really tricky road.

And so I sit here post-election pondering multiple American histories, the histories of presidents, and Constitutions, and theater movements. And I don’t want to argue that things should be as they once were. We don’t look back in order to go back, but rather to better choose what going forward looks like. I’m so grateful for the evolution of thought that has created the possibilities for new stories, not the least of which is my new story as a legally married person. But in this post-election bliss for many of us, it makes sense for us consider why we value public service, and why we’ve chosen a life in the nonprofit theater. Have we done it to succeed on personal terms or do we make art to make the world better?

Polly Carl is the director of the Center for the Theater Commons at Emerson College, and the editor of the online journal HowlRound. 

Posted in actors, Arts, Drama, Fountain Theatre, new plays, performing arts, plays, playwright, Theater, theatre

Tagged 2012 election, arts organizations, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Center for the Theater Commons, Diane Ragsdale, Founding Fathers, Fountain Theatre, Gregory Mosher, HowlRound, John Adams, Los Angeles, nonprofit, Oskar Eustis, performing arts, plays, Polly Carl, public service, Public Theater, Robert Brustein, Rocco Landesman, theater, Theater Arts, theatre, Tony Taccone, Zelda Fichandler